In his comprehensive treatise Darts, Keith Turner has estimated that darts are thrown by 20 million or so aficionados in the United States alone at levels ranging from friendly games at local pubs to organized, often highly lucrative, professional tournaments. Notwithstanding the level at which the game is enjoyed, the play and its players are highly competitive. Attendant with this competition has come a demand from throwers of all abilities for a dart offering better performance than those heretofore known.
A modern dart can be divided into four functionally distinct components: the point, the barrel or body component, the shaft or item, and the flight. The point is the business end of the dart that effects its penetration into the board. Accordingly, the point typically is made of a hard material such as high tensile steel that can be ground to a sharp tip to lessen the frictional forces that oppose its entry into the board. However, for certain automatic scoring target applications, the point may be formed of plastic for the purpose of avoiding target damage.
The barrel or body component, into which the point is embedded, supplies a grip for the thrower and the principal weight to carry the dart to the board and to sink the tip of the point thereinto. In order to keep its cross-sectional area to a minimum, thereby maximizing the amount of board open to subsequent throws, for higher quality darts, the barrel is generally machined from a dense metal such as brass or titanium. The remainder of the body of the dart consists of a tapered shaft or stem which serves to hold the flight the correct distance from the barrel. Unlike the barrel, the shaft is composed of a lightweight material such as aluminum, fiberglass or graphite to minimize the moment of inertia or torque to which the point is subject subsequent to penetration into the board. Wedged into the distal end of the shaft is the flight. Traditionally composed of three or four feathers disposed in a symmetrical fashion, the flight imparts the aerodynamic stability necessary to keep the dart true to its path. Modern darts often substitute plastic or paper, but feathers are still preferred because they allow another dart to pass through and strike the board instead of being deflected. Additionally, the natural curvature of the feathers in relation to the shaft imparts an accuracy-improving rotational motion to the dart much as rifling in a gun barrel does to a bullet.
The demand from the throwers for a more competitive dart has been partially addressed by the substitution of the wood, feathers, and cane materials of years past with the titanium, polymers, and graphite of the present. However, although more advanced materials of construction of the dart's components has increased performance somewhat, little has been done to further improve performance through modifications affecting the very mechanics and dynamics of the dart itself.
In scientific terms, a dart is basically a projectile whose flight from the thrower's hand to the board is governed by the laws of aerodynamics and physics. During flight, the gravitational forces acting upon the relatively massive, forwardly disposed body component and point are counter-balanced by the lift and air resistance provided by the rearwardly disposed flight. Upon impact with the board, the tip of the point, driven by the inertia of the barrel, spreads the densely-packed bristle fibers or the rolled paper of which the surface of the typical board is comprised to form a hole into which the point can penetrate. If the momentum and consequent impact energy of the dart exceeds a threshold value, its point will achieve a penetration sufficient to withstand the gravitational influences pulling the dart downward, and the dart will remain imbedded in the board.
Of utmost importance in the game is the need for a dart to remain in the board once it strikes it. The most accurately thrown dart is wasted if its penetration into the board is insufficient to hold the dart in place. Using heavier darts helps to increase penetration, but a sport limitation of 42 grams, as well as the need to keep the cross-sectional area of the barrel to a minimum preclude the adding of weight as a method to improve performance. Moreover, increasing the weight of the dart or providing a harder, sharper tip is ineffective in instances where penetration failure is a result of the tip striking one of numerous metal wires which divide the board into its various scoring sections. Accordingly, it can be seen that if further advancements in dart performance are to be achieved, they must result from more than merely supplanting the dart's current materials of construction with newer ones. Rather, the improvements must be gleaned from a mechanistic approach.
Recently, mechanistic innovations in darts have surfaced. A dart marketed under the trade designation "VARIANT" incorporates a hollow barrel with a weight moveable therein that enables the thrower to custom balance the dart's weight distribution to suit his or her own particular throwing style. Another dart, marketed under the trade designation "SCORPION," includes a spring-loaded point that, during dislocation of the dart from the board, can be triggerably retracted into the barrel to facilitate removal. Also, a dart marketed under the trade designation "HAMMERHEAD" features a point that, upon impact, recoils into the barrel where a contacting surface communicates with a corresponding contacting surface of the proximal end of the point so as to effect a driving action that is said to provide better tip penetration into the board and thereby reduce "bounce-outs."
However, notwithstanding the aforementioned mechanistic developments, the dart manufacturing industries have failed to adequately address the more persistent, and prevalent problem in the game of darts: that of an ostensibly accurate and sufficiently momentous dart failing to achieve penetration into the board as a result of its point tip striking of one of the board's metal or plastic score boundary dividing wires. Inasmuch as a dart that bounces off this non-yielding region of the board is a dart and possibly a game lost, there exists a continuing need for a dart structure which solves or mitigates this problem.